About

Poetry Junkies do more than talk. We listen. Listen enough to leave behind our to-do lists and our to-be lists; listen enough to leave behind our tired, ‘dirty locomotive’ state of human beings and become shimmering human becomings..

Every few weeks we gather online in the presence of a luminary living poet. We chat for the first few minutes, bantering away the cobwebs of contemporary distractions. Then we give our guest poet the floor (the floor usually starts flying) and they loft us into their acute and particular word-realms. Their soul fossils. After the blessing of each reading, we have an open, free-flowing conversation. Ideas geyser forth. Unheard-of, must-read books glimmer into being. Questions get answered, or, better, deepened. We get fed by new hungers. The complex poetic highs accrued in each session help blast us through the doldrums of our chronic ordinary human unhappiness.

As Salvador Dali said: “I don’t take drugs. I am drugs.”

Or as Poetry Junkies founder Lucien Zell boldly declared: “Poetry is like cocaine. You do it in lines, it gets you high, and if you do the good stuff you’ll be addicted for life.”

Poetry Junkies began as an online poetry discussion group. We grew out of a workshop at the Community of Writers. As the final class wound down, we tentatively agreed to meet twice a month to keep reading and discussing poems by masters like Czesław Miłosz . . . and Wisława Szymborska . . . and William Shakespeare . . . and Elizabeth Bishop . . . and Rainer Maria Rilke . . . and Federico García Lorca . . . and Charles Baudelaire . . . and Emily Dickinson . . . and Pablo Neruda . . . (we’re junkies, remember?, the list is looooooong/infinite).

The conversations were rich. Deep. Informative.

The word-sorcerer Hermann Hesse, however, wrote about a relatively neglected (and relatively painful) aspect of evolution. Hesse pictured evolution as a massive winding staircase, and suggested that one of the hardest challenges posed to those scaling this staircase was leaving a good step . . . to arrive at a better one.

Fine as a bimonthly poetry discussion group was, a better/higher step beckoned. We decided to reach out and invite preeminent contemporary poets to read their poems and hang out with us Junkies to discuss their poetics. Because if poets don’t listen to poets, who will?

Whether you’re a poet, a poetry lover, or just vaguely curious about our subtle and magical art: welcome home/away!